Catholic Activity: Stitching Feast-Day Symbols

Outline symbols for your children to sew over with yarn in order to create wall hangings or decorative pillows.

DIRECTIONS

For feasts like Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and others, we have a project that is easy, practical, and lots of fun, and provides us with a meditation on the lessons of the feast. On brightly colored construction paper chosen to go with the feast, we lightly sketch one of the appropriate symbols (Sacred Heart, Chalice and Host, Immaculate Heart with M, so forth). Placing the paper on the couch or a hard pillow, we punch holes with a large nail every inch or inch and one-half around the outlines. With a large-eyed needle the children outline the symbols with colored yarns in a sewing stitch (much as mothers have done with "sewing on cards" sets when they were little). The result is a bright banner for the wall or the center of the table on a feast day. Stephen has done them (very well, too), and he is only five; so it is a project the little ones will enjoy. It takes no time at all to assemble, and is a quiet, neat project — ideal for small apartments, crowded rooms, "company times."

Activity Source: Year and Our Children, The by Mary Reed Newland, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, New York, 1956